Part 5

Insanity in some degree ran through the Martin family. His brother John, who died in 1854, was a prominent artist, whose unbalanced mind did not give way, but led him to paint extraordinary pictures, chiefly of Scriptural interest and apocalyptic horrors. He was in his day considered a genius, and many of his terrific imaginations were engraved and must yet be familiar: such pictures as “Belshazzar’s Feast,” “The Eve of the Deluge,” “The Last Man,” and “The Plains of Heaven”: pictures well calculated to give children nightmares.

X

WE must now leave York for the North. To do so, we proceed through Bootham Bar, where the taxis linger that ply between the city and the railway station.

Let us glance back upon the picturesque sky-line of City and Minster and read, maybe, the modern explanatory historical inscription placed on the ancient Bar. Thus:—

“Entry from North through Forest of Galtres. In old times armed men were stationed here to watch, and to conduct travellers through the forest and protect them against the wolves.

“The Royal Arms were taken down in 1650, when Cromwell passed through, against Scotland. Heads of three rebels exposed here, for attempting to restore Commonwealth, 1663.

“Erected on Roman foundation, probably early in 13th centy.

“Interior rebuilt with freestone, 1719.

“The portcullis remains.”

So, in those ancient times when the Forest of Galtres lay immediately before you on passing out of Bootham Bar and going North—the forest with wolves and bandits—you stepped not into a suburb, but came directly off the threshold into the wild.

[Picture: Bootham Bar]

To-day, outside the walls we come at once into the district of Clifton, after Knavesmire the finest suburb of York; the wide road lined with old mansions that almost reek of prebendal appointments, J.P.’s, incomes of over two thousand a year, and butlers. It is true that there are those which cannot be included in this category, but they are here on sufferance and as a foil to the majesty of their superiors, just as the Lunatic Asylum a little farther down the road gives, or should give, by contrast a finer flavour to the lives of those who have not to live in it. There is another pleasing thing at Clifton, in the altogether charming new building of the “White Horse” inn, which seems to hint that they have at last begun to recover the lost art in Yorkshire of building houses that are not vulgar or hideous. It is full time.

Would you see a charming village church, a jewel in its sort? Then, when reaching Skelton, three miles onward, explore the bye-road at the back of the village, over whose clustered few roofs its Early English bell-cote peeps. But a moment, please, before we reach it. This “bye-road” is the original highway, and the “back” of the village street its old front. There is a moral application somewhere in these altered circumstances for those who have the wit, the inclination, and the opportunity to seek it.

[Picture: Skelton Church]

The improved road, a hundred years old, is carried straight and level past the rear of the cottages, and the rugged old one goes serpentining past the front doors, where the entrance to the “Bay Horse” looks out across a little green to where the church stands, the faded old Bay Horse himself wondering where the traffic that use to pass this way has all gone to. The signs of the “Bay Horse” and the “Yorkshire Grey” are, by the way, astonishingly frequent on the Great North Road.

But the church. It is an unpretending building, without a tower, and only a bell-cote rising from its broad roof; but perfect within its limits. Early English throughout, with delicately-cut mouldings, beautiful triple lancets at the east end, and fine porch, the green and grey harmonies of its slate roof and well-preserved stonework, complete a rarely satisfying picture. A legend, still current, says it was built from stone remaining over after the building of the south transept of York Cathedral, in 1227. The Church in the Wood it was then, for from the gates of York to Easingwold, a distance of thirteen miles, stretched that great Forest of Galtres, through which, to guide wandering travellers, as we have already seen, the lantern-tower and burning cresset of All Saints in the Pavement, at York, were raised aloft.

Red deer roamed the Forest of Galtres, and bandits not so chivalrous as Robin Hood; so few dared to explore its recesses unarmed and unaccompanied. But where in olden times these romantic attendants of, or dissuading circumstances from travel existed, we have now only occasional trees and an infinity of flat roads, past Shipton village to Tollerton Cross Lanes and Easingwold. This country is dulness personified. The main road is flat and featureless, and the branch roads instinct with a melancholy emptiness that hives in every ditch and commonplace hedgerow. A deadly sameness, a paralysing negation, closes the horizon of this sparsely settled district, depopulated in that visitation of fire and sword when William the Conqueror came, in 1069, and massacred a hundred thousand of those who had dared to withstand him. They had surrendered on promise of their lives and property being respected, but the fierce Norman utterly destroyed the city of York and laid waste the whole of the country between York and Durham. Those who were not slain perished miserably of cold and famine. Their pale ghosts still haunt the route of the Great North Road and afflict it, though more than eight hundred years have flown.

Now comes Easingwold; grimly bare and gritty wide street, with narrow pavements and broad selvedges of cobbles sloping from them down into a roadway filled, not with traffic, but with children at noisy play. Shabby houses lining this street, houses little better than cottages, and ugly at that; grey, hard-featured, forbidding. Imagine half a mile of this, with a large church on a knoll away at the northern end, and you have Easingwold. One house is interesting. It is easily identified, because it is the only one of any architectural character in the place. Now a school, it was once the chief coaching and posting establishment, under the sign of the “Rose and Crown,” and in those times kept five post boys, and, by consequence, twenty horses, others being kept for the “Wellington” and “Express” coaches which Lacy, the landlord, used to horse on the Easingwold to Thirsk stage. The “New Inn,” although an inferior house, was the place at which the Royal mail and the “Highflyer” changed.

An old post boy of the “Rose and Crown” survived until recent years, in the person of Tommy Hutchinson. Originally a tailor, he early forsook the board and the needle for the pigskin and the whip. If a tailor be the ninth part of a man, certainly the weazened postboys (who ever saw a fat one?) of old were themselves only fractions, so far as appearance went; and accordingly Tommy was not badly suited. But a power of endurance was contained within that spare frame, and he eclipsed John Blagg of Retford’s hundred and ten miles’ day on one occasion, riding post five times from Easingwold to York and back, a distance of a hundred and thirty miles. Tommy used to express an utter contempt for “bilers on wheels,” as he called locomotives. “Ah divvent see nowt in ’em,” he would say; “ye can’t beat a po’shay and good horses.” Peace be with him!

That rare thing on the Great North Road, a rise, leads out of Easingwold, past unkempt cottages, to “White House Inn,” a mile and a half distant, where the inn buildings, now farmhouses, but still brilliantly whitewashed, stand on either side of the road, in a lonely spot near where the Kyle stream, like a flowing ditch, oozes beneath Dawnay Bridge.

The “White House” was the scene of a murder in 1623. At that time the innkeeper was a certain Ralph Raynard, who “kept company” with a girl in service at Red House, Thornton Bridge. The lovers quarrelled, and in a pique the girl married a farmer named Fletcher, of Moor House, Raskelfe. Unhappily, she did not love the man she had married, while she certainly did retain an affection for her old sweetheart, and he for her. Going between Raskelfe and Easingwold on market-days on her horse, she would often stop at the “White House,” and chat with Ralph Raynard; the ostler, Mark Dunn, minding the horse when she dismounted. Raynard’s sister kept house with him at the inn, and she saw that no good could come of these visits, but he would not listen to her warnings, and the visits continued. It was not long before Fletcher’s neighbours began to hint to him something of these little flirtations of his wife with her old lover; and one evening he caught the ostler of the “White House” in his orchard, where he was waiting for an opportunity to deliver a message from Raynard to her. The man returned to the inn without having fulfilled his mission, and smarting from a thrashing he had received at the hands of the indignant farmer. Shortly after this, Fletcher had occasion to go a journey. Things had not been going well with him latterly, and his home was rendered unhappy by the evidence of his wife’s dislike of him. Little wonder, then, that he had dismal forebodings as he set out. Before leaving, he wrote on a sheet of paper:—

If I should be missing, or suddenly wanted be, Mark Ralph Raynard, Mark Dunn, and mark my wife for me,

addressing it to his sister.

No sooner was he gone than Mrs. Fletcher mounted her horse and rode to Raskelfe, where, with Raynard and Mark Dunn, a murderous plot was contrived for putting Fletcher out of the way. They were waiting for him when he returned at evening, and as he stood a moment on Dawnay Bridge, where the little river runs beneath the highway, two of them rushed upon him and threw him into the water. It would be difficult for a man to drown here, but the innkeeper and the ostler leapt in after him, and as he lay there held his head under water, while his wife seized his feet. When the unfortunate man was quite dead they thrust his body into a sack, and, carrying their burden with them to the inn, buried it in the garden, Raynard sowing some mustard-seed over the spot. This took place on the 1st of May. On the 7th of July, Raynard went to Topcliffe Fair, and put up at the “Angel.” Going into the stable, he was confronted by the apparition of the unhappy Fletcher, glowing with a strange light and predicting retribution. He rushed out among the booths, and tried to think he had been mistaken. Coming to a booth where they sold small trinkets, he thought he would buy a present for his sweetheart, and, taking up a chain of coral beads, asked the stallkeeper how it looked on the neck. To his dismay the apparition stood opposite, with a red chain round its neck, with its head hanging to one side, like that of an executed criminal, while a voice informed him that presently he and his accomplices should be wearing hempen necklaces.

When night had fallen he mounted his horse and rode for home. On the way, at a spot called the Carr, he saw something in the road. It was a figure emerging from a sack and shaking the water off it, like a Newfoundland dog. With a yell of terror the haunted man dug his heels into his horse and galloped madly away; but the figure, irradiated by a phosphorescent glimmer and dragging an equally luminous sack after it, was gliding in front of him all the while, at an equal pace, and so continued until the “White House” was reached, where it slid through the garden hedge and into the ground where Fletcher’s body had been laid.

Raynard’s sister was waiting for him, with supper ready, and with a dish of freshly-cut mustard. _She_ did not see the spectre sitting opposite, pointing a minatory finger at that dreadful salad, but _he_ did, and terrified, confessed to the crime. Sisterly affection was not proof against this, and she laid information against the three accomplices before a neighbouring Justice of the Peace, Sir William Sheffield of Raskelfe Park. They were committed to York Castle, tried, and hanged on July 28, 1623. The bodies were afterwards cut down and taken to the inn, being gibbeted near the scene of the crime, on a spot still called Gallows Hill, where the bones of the three malefactors were accidentally ploughed up over a hundred and twenty years ago.

If its surroundings may be said to fit in with a crime, then this seems an ideal spot for the commission of dark deeds, this eerie place where an oozy plantation, or little wood, is placed beside the road, its trees standing in pools or on moss-grown tussocks; the road in either direction a solitude.

Raskelfe, or “Rascall,” as it is generally called, lies away from the road. It has a church which still possesses a wooden tower, and the local rhyme,

Wooden church, wooden steeple, Rascally church, and rascally people.

is yet heard in the mouths of depreciatory neighbours.

XI

THE Hambleton Hills now come in sight, and close in the view on the right hand, at a distance of five miles; running parallel with the road as far as Northallerton; sullen hills, with the outlines of mountains, and wanting only altitude to earn the appellation. The road, in sympathy with its nearness to them, goes up and down in jerky rises and falls, passing the outlying houses of Thormanby and the farmsteads of Birdforth, which pretends, with its mean little church, like a sanctified cow-shed, to be a village—and signally fails.

The gates of Thirkleby Park and the “Griffin” inn, standing where a toll-gate formerly stood on what was once Bagby Common, bring one past a bye-road which leads to Coxwold, five miles away, and to the Hambleton White Horse, a quite unhistorical imitation, cut in the hillside in 1857, of its prehistoric forerunners in Berkshire and Wilts. Coxwold is a rarely pretty village, famous as having been the living of the Reverend Laurence Sterne from 1760 to 1768. The house he lived in, now divided into three cottages, is the place where _Tristram Shandy_ was finished and the _Sentimental Journey_ written. “Shandy Hall” it is called, “shandy” being the local dialect-word for “crazy.”

Thirsk lies less than three miles ahead. There have been those who have called it “picturesque.” Let us pity them, for those to whom Thirsk shows a picturesque side must needs have acquaintance with only the sorriest and most commonplace of towns. The place is, in fact, a larger Easingwold, with the addition of a market-place like that of Selby—after the abbey has been subtracted from it! There are Old Thirsk and New Thirsk, the new town called into existence by the railway, a mile to the west. The “Three Tuns,” “Crown,” and “Fleece” were the three coaching inns of Thirsk, and still show their hard-featured faces to the grey, gaunt streets. The one pretty “bit” is encountered after having left the town behind. Passing the church, the road is bordered by the beautiful broad sheet of water formed by damming the Caldbeck. Looking backwards, the view is charming, with the church-tower coming into the composition, a glance to the left including the Hambleton Hills.

The hamlet of Thornton-le-Street, which derives its name from standing on an old Roman road, is a tiny place with a small church full of large monuments, and the remains of a huge old posting establishment, once familiar to travellers as the “Spotted Dog,” standing on either side of the road. One side appears to be empty, and the other is now the post office. A graceful clump of poplars now shades the sharp bend where the road descends, past the lodge-gates of the Hall, the seat of the Earl of Cathcart. Presently the road climbs again to the crest whence Thornton-le-Moor may be glimpsed on the left, and thence goes, leaving the singularly named Thornton-le-Beans on the right, in commonplace fashion to Northallerton.

[Picture: The “Spotted Dog,” Thornton-le-Street]

As are Easingwold and Thirsk, so is Northallerton. Let that suffice for its aspect, and let us to something of its story, which practically begins in 1138, at the battle of Northallerton, dimly read of in schooldays, and still capable of conferring an interest upon the locality, even though the site of that old-time struggle on Standard Hill is three miles away to the north on Cowton Moor. The position of the townlet, directly in the line of march of Scots descending to harry the English, and of the English marching to punish those hairy-legged Caledonians, led to many plunderings and burnings, and to various scenes of retribution, enacted in the streets or along the road; and although Northallerton must nowadays confess to a mile-long dulness, time cannot have hung heavily with its inhabitants when the Scots burnt their houses in 1319 and again in 1322; when the rebel Earls of 1569 were executed near the church; when the Scottish army held Charles the First prisoner here in 1647, or when—last scene in its story—the Duke of Cumberland encamped on the hillsides in 1745.

The name of Allerton is said to derive from the Anglo-Saxon _aelr_, an alder tree, and many are the Allertons of sorts in Yorkshire. Its central feature—which, however, is not geographically central, but at the northern end of the one long street—is the church, large and with a certain air of nobility which befits the parish church of such a place as Northallerton, anciently the capital of a “soke,” and still giving a name to the “Northallertonshire” district of Yorkshire. The old coaching inns of the town, like those of so many other northern towns and villages on this road, are not impressive to the Southerner, who, the further north he progresses, is, with Dr. Johnson, still more firmly convinced that he is leaving the finest fruits of civilisation behind him. First now, as then, is the “Golden Lion,” large but not lovely; the inn referred to as the “Black Swan” by Sydney Smith when writing to Lady Grey, advising her how to journey from London, in the passage, “Do not set off too soon, or you will be laid up at the ‘Black Swan,’ Northallerton, or the ‘Elephant and Castle,’ Boroughbridge; and your bill will come to a thousand pounds, besides the waiter.” The true sportsman who reads these lines will put up at the “Golden Lion” to test whether or not the reverend humorist is out of date as regards the tariff; nor will he forget to try the Northallerton ale, to determine if Master George Meryon’s verse, written in the days of James the Second, is still topical:—

Northallerton, in Yorkshire, doth excel! All England, nay, all Europe, for strong yell.

The “Golden Lion” was, at the close of the coaching era, the foremost inn at Northallerton, and at its doors the “Wellington” London and Newcastle coach changed teams until the railway ran it off the road. The Edinburgh mail changed at the “Black Bull,” which survives as an inn, but only half its original size, the other half now being a draper’s shop. The “King’s Head,” another coaching-house, has quite retired into private life, while the “Old Golden Lion,” not a very noted coaching establishment, except, perhaps, for the bye-roads, remains much the same as ever.

XII

AT Northallerton we reach the junction of the alternative route, which, branching from the Selby and York itinerary, goes over difficult, but much more beautiful, country by way of Wetherby and Boroughbridge. The ways diverge at the northern extremity of Doncaster, and as both can equally claim to be an integral part of the Great North Road, it is necessary to go back these sixty-three miles to that town and explore the route. Beginning at a left-hand fork by the flat meadows that border the river Don, it comes in a mile to York Bar, a name recalling the existence of a turnpike-gate, whose disappearance so recently as 1879 seems to bring us strangely near old coaching days. The toll-house still stands, and with the little inn beyond, backed and surrounded by tall trees, forms a pleasant peep down the long flat road. “Red House,” nearly three miles onward, is plainly indicated by its flaring red-painted walls. Now a farmhouse, it was once a small coaching-inn principally concerned with the traffic along the Wakefield road, which branches off here to the left.

[Picture: York Bar]

Passing this, we come in two miles to Robin Hood’s Well, a group of houses by Skelbrooke Park, where at the “New Inn” and the “Robin Hood” many coaches changed horses daily, the passengers taking the opportunity of drinking from Robin Hood’s Well, a spring connected with that probably mythical outlaw, who is said to have met the Bishop of Hereford travelling along the road at this spot, and to have not only held him to heavy ransom, but to have compelled him to dance an undignified jig round an oak in Skelbrooke Park, on a spot still called (now the tree itself has disappeared) “Bishop’s Tree Root.” Among famous travellers who have sipped of the crystal spring of Robin Hood’s Well is Evelyn, who journeyed this way in 1654. “Near it,” he says, “is a stone chaire; and an iron ladle to drink out of, chained to the seat.”

[Picture: Robin Hood’s Well]

Some fifty years later, the very ugly building that now covers the spring was erected by Vanbrugh for the Earl of Carlisle. It cannot be said to add much to the romantic associations of the place, but the efforts of the wayfarers, who in two centuries have carved every available inch of its surface with their names, render it a curious sight.

Here the road begins a long climb up to the spot where five ways meet, the broad left-hand road conducting into Leeds. This is, or was, Barnsdale Bar, where some of the local Leeds coaches branched from the Great North Road, the chief ones between London and Leeds continuing along this route as far as Peckfield Turnpike, five miles to the other side of Ferrybridge. Barnsdale Bar is, like all the other toll-bars, a thing of the past, but the old toll-house still hides among the trees by the roadside. Beyond it the way lies along an exposed road high up on the hill-tops; a lonely stretch of country where it is a peculiarly ill mischance to be caught in a storm. Thence it plunges suddenly into the deep gorge of Went Bridge, where the little river Went goes with infantile fury among rocks and mossy boulders along a winding course thickly overhung with trees. The wooded sides of this narrow valley are picturesque in the highest degree, but were probably not highly appreciated by timid coach-passengers who, having been driven down the precipitous road at one side at the peril of their lives, were turned out by the guard to ease the toiling horses by walking up the corresponding ascent at the other. This is the prettiest spot in all “merry Barnsdale,” and anciently one of those most affected by Robin Hood. His very degenerate successors, the poachers and cut-throats of James the First’s time, found it a welcome harbourage and foregathered at the predecessor of the Old Blue Bell Inn, which was accordingly deprived of its license for some time. The old sign, bearing the date of 1633, when business was probably resumed, is still kept within the house, as the rhymed inscription on the modern one outside informs the passer-by:—

The Blae Bell on Wentbridge Hill, The old sign is existing still Inside the house.

An old posting-inn, the “Bay Horse,” has long since reverted to the condition of a private house.